With winter temperatures regularly dipping below -25C at his vineyard, winemaker Norman Hardie definitely didn't choose an easy place to grow his grapes.

"Minus 25 is the absolute death knell for vitis vinifera [the common grape vine], we actually have to bury our vines in the winter [to protect them]. It's a huge job," says the 51-year-old.

"And then we can get snap spring frosts that can quickly ruin a crop. We lost more than 80% in 2015."

While most of us associate winemaking with warm countries, Mr Hardie has since 2004 been making wine in… Canada.

Based in picturesque Prince Edward County, Ontario, a two-hour drive east of Toronto alongside Lake Ontario, the summers are more often glorious.

The winters, on the other hand, are harsh, which means that the team at Norman Hardie Winery face a race against the cold weather every November.

"I have 80,000 plants today, so that is almost a quarter of a million canes [the vine's branches] that we have to tie down by hand, and then cover with a mound of earth," says Norman.

"Before we then carefully open up and untie in the spring."

{module [281]}

If that wasn't labour intensive enough, come April and May Norman and his team have to light fires and position wind turbines to try to drive away late frosts. But sometimes, such as in 2015, they just aren't that successful.

Up against such challenges, you might question why Norman ever chose to plant vineyards and build a winery in Ontario. He says that despite the challenges, the combination of cool weather and the clay and limestone soil of Prince Edward County allow him to make world class wines.

"The great wines are always made on the edge, and we're certainly on the edge," says South African-born Norman, who prior to going into winemaking had been a sommelier (wine waiter) in Toronto.

"I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world because the flavours we get out of these soils are unique."

Primarily making white wines from chardonnay and red wines from pinot noir, Norman Hardie's wines now have a cult following in Canada, and are even said to be the favourite tipples of Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau.

But from day one, Norman - who studied winemaking in Burgundy, Oregon, California, South Africa, and New Zealand prior to establishing his own winery - wanted his wines to be sold internationally.

This brought his next big challenge - how to persuade a sceptical world to take Canadian wine seriously, when even Norman admits that 30 years ago the country made "terrible wine".

Norman's solution was to turn himself into a travelling salesman, and build up his wine's global reputation "one top sommelier one top buyer, and one top wine journalist, at a time… flying around the world, pounding the pavement, speaking to people, changing people's ideas about Canada".

So attending wine fairs, visiting wine importers, and knocking on the doors of Michelin-star restaurants, he started to slowly build up export orders.

Focusing particularly on the UK and New York, Norman says his personal, face-to-face approach enabled him to let some of the most influential people in the global wine world "understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we are doing it".

He adds: "You can only do that with face time, and once you have them they are your evangelists."

From selling 6,000 bottles in 2004, Norman Hardy Winery produced 240,000 in 2016. From that 6,804 bottles were exported across eight countries - China, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.

And he still is regularly overseas promoting his wines, including spending five to six days every year in the UK.

Back at the winery, there are now six year-round employees, rising to 50 in the busy summer months and at harvest time in late September and October. The business now has annual revenues of 4.1m Canadian dollars ($3.3m; £2.5m).

John Downes, a London-based wine expert, who has the top "master of wine" qualification, says that Norman was right to recognise the fact that as Canada is such a little known wine region he had to do a lot of marketing work to "stand out" on the global stage.

Mr Downes adds: "A lot of people in wine don't tell stories, they say 'here's my wine what do you think about it?'.

"But they don't tell the story behind the wine, and that gives the picture of the wine to the consumer. Norman does that very well."

While exporting wine is not without its challenges, such as the need to produce different labels for each country, Norman says that building up a vibrant export business has also boosted his sales in Canada.

Now preparing to bury the vines for another winter, Norman says: "That credibility, that international credibility, says you're doing something right."

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Dolce Vita Magazine, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

From cocoa to tea, food and drink giants are setting their own standards for ethical sourcing of raw materials, moving away from third-party labels such as Fairtrade.

Mondelez International (MDLZ.O), owner of chocolate brands Cadbury and Toblerone, Unilever (ULVR.L), behind tea brands such as Lipton and PG Tips, and Barry Callebaut, the world’s biggest producer of chocolate and cocoa products, have all introduced their own schemes.

They say their targets are more comprehensive and some claim their schemes are more effective in tracking whether a product is ethically sourced every step of the way. With companies under financial pressure, analysts say it has also been a way to save money.

But critics are worried that the standards that third-party groups such as UTZ Certified or Rainforest Alliance have fought to establish risk being muddled and what is deemed ethical and sustainable could become more ambiguous.

“Standards measuring environmental and social issues need to be transparent because, once this process happens behind closed doors, it is difficult to see how companies and farms apply them,” said Sloane Hamilton, labor rights policy advisor at Oxfam, a charity focused on alleviating poverty.

{module [279]}

“We don’t want to see standards watered down, and neither do we want customers to be faced by a bewildering proliferation of different certification schemes.”

Third-party certifiers are not opposed to all self-certification, even though the loss of fees could threaten their future. Rather, they are worried standards could become meaningless if too many companies set their own criteria.

Mondelez started selling the first Green & Black’s chocolate in the UK without a Fairtrade logo in August, more than 23 years after the brand’s Maya Gold bar received Britain’s first mark.

The bar instead carries the stamp of “Cocoa Life”, a Mondelez scheme started in 2012 with broad goals including improved productivity, protection of fertile land and gender equality in farming communities.

Mondelez says Fairtrade is still an “implementing partner” and the group’s auditing arm is used to vet cocoa sourced through “Cocoa Life”.

Fairtrade, a non profit, aims to push for a better deal for farmers and workers in developing nations. It sets standards, including a minimum price for raw materials, and requires companies to contribute toward businesses or community projects, in exchange for the Fairtrade stamp.

{module [280]}

But as the concept of ethically-sourced ingredients has become better understood by consumers, brands have started adopting standards that work for their business and image.

“It’s opened the door for companies to say ‘well let’s develop a standard that suits our business and also has the impact that we want to have on the ground,” said Alan Rownan, ethical labels analyst at Euromonitor.

Crafting in-house standards has also become a way to trim costs for big companies under financial pressure as economic growth slows and consumers opt for healthier snacks or smaller, more artisan brands.

“When the whole market is certified, the ability to have a higher price for it becomes less,” said Jon Cox, analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich, who follows companies such as Nestle and Barry Callebaut.

“So why not bring it in-house anyway and save money? And if they can convince consumers that it’s as good as some of the independents, if not better, then that maybe helps them as well.”

Reuters

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Dolce Vita Magazine, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

If you are a tea connoisseur, here's some bad news: your morning cuppa of steaming Darjeeling tea may soon be difficult to get.

Famously called the "champagne of teas", it is grown in 87 gardens in the foothills of the Himalayas in Darjeeling in West Bengal state. Some of the bushes are as old as 150 years and were introduced to the region by a Scottish surgeon.

Half of the more than 8 million kg - 60% of it is certified organic - of this sought-after tea produced every year is exported, mainly to the UK, Europe and Japan. The tea tots up nearly $80m (£60m) in annual sales.

Darjeeling tea is also one of the world's most expensive - some of it has fetched prices of up to $850 (£647) per kg. The tea is also India's first Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) product.

Since June, Darjeeling has been hit by violent protests and prolonged strikes in support of a campaign by a local party demanding a separate state for the area's majority Nepali-speaking Gorkha community.

The upshot: some 100,000 workers - permanent and temporary - working in the gardens have halted work. Production has been severely hit. Only a third of last year's crop of 8.32 million kg had been harvested when work stopped in June. If the trouble continues, garden owners say they are staring at losses amounting to nearly $40m.

"This is the worst crisis we have ever faced. Future orders are being cancelled, and there is no fresh supply. Connoisseurs of Darjeeling may have to soon switch to other teas until the situation improves," Darjeeling Tea Association's principal advisor Sandeep Mukherjee told me.

The shutdown in the gardens couldn't have come at a worse time.

{module [279]}

The harvesting season in Darjeeling extends to roughly a little over seven months - from March to October. It is also divided into four distinct seasons called "flushes".

The ongoing impasse came in the middle of the second - or summer flush - season which gives the tea an unique "muscatel" scent and accounts for half of the yearly crop and and 40% of annual sales. The separatist agitation in Darjeeling has disrupted life in the region since 1980s, but in the past the strikes usually happened during the lull between seasons.

Tea buyers are already feeling the crunch. In India, the tea is fast going off the shelves. Some supermarkets in Japan have said their stocks will run out by November if supplies don't resume. An importer in Germany says the tea runs the risk of becoming a "limited edition" beverage.

Even if the agitation is called off tomorrow and the workers return to the gardens, it will take more than a month to begin harvesting. The gardens have been idle for more than two months, and are full of weeds. Tea bushes have become "free growth plants", say owners. Workers have to clean and slash the bushes before they can begin plucking the leaves again.

{module [281]}

Clearly, if the political impasse is resolved this month, the gardens of Darjeeling will be humming only next year - India is heading into a season of yearly festivals, marked by long holidays.

"For the moment, Darjeeling looks like becoming a limited edition tea all right," says Sanjay Lohia, who owns 13 gardens in the region. "But I'd just request the connoisseurs to bear with us, and we promise to be back with the our very best quality soon". For the moment, tea drinkers may have to learn to live without their favourite brew.

BBC

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Dolce Vita Magazine, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Belgium's national dish, the deep fried potato sticks that much of the English-speaking world gallingly calls "French fries", has been saved.

So, at least, the national government said on Wednesday as the European Union agreed to amend food safety rules aimed at curbing cancer. Belgium's farm minister claimed the EU will now spare the nation's "friteries" from having to change traditional preparation methods.{module [293]}

"The Belgian fry is saved! Europe has listened to Belgium," Agriculture Minister Willy Borsus said in a statement retweeted by Prime Minister Charles Michel following an EU decision.

The news was doubtless all the tastier as it came on the eve of Friday's National Day, commemorating the 1830 revolution that won Belgium independence from Dutch rule.

Despite repeated assurances from EU officials that there was no threat to their host country's gastronomy, local media has been gripped for weeks with the saga of the EU threat to Belgium's chips, traditionally consumed on the hoof with mayonnaise or, in restaurants, with steamed mussels as "moules frites."{module [281]}

In a statement issued in Brussels, the European Commission said EU governments had agreed its proposals to force cafes and restaurants to apply measures aimed at reducing the presence of carcinogenic acrylamide in food. Frying, baking and roasting produce the substance out of natural acids and sugars.

Some argue that Belgium's traditional method of frying potatoes twice to get crunchy chips creates more acrylamide.

Minister Borsus said Belgian amendments were incorporated into the text. The Commission said the measure must be applied in ways "proportionate" to the size and type of establishment.

Belgian fries are typically sold in paper cones from roadside shacks whose image got a recent international boost when German Chancellor Angela Merkel popped out for a snack during a particularly trying EU summit in Brussels last year.

Reuters

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Dolce Vita Magazine, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

“Try the deer heart,” Boris Akimov suggests from behind a bushy beard. My stomach sinks, but I cannot refuse: Akimov is a demigod in the Moscow food world, and we are sitting in LavkaLavka, the flagship restaurant of the LavkaLavka farmers’ cooperative. The crimson meat comes thinly sliced atop a celery puree, with a garnish of cowberry sorbet. It’s surprisingly tender.

When I first visited the cooperative five years ago, its footprint was limited to a cramped shop and café hidden in a labyrinthine courtyard, and its focus on fresh produce and homemade delicacies was still novel. Russian cuisine remained mired in a Soviet-era bog of potatoes and borscht. Fine dining mostly involved imported cuisine, and locavorism remained foreign, at least in concept. Yet over the past several years, a band of Russian farmers, chefs, and restaurateurs have launched a revival of Russian gastronomy.

They have found an unlikely ally in President Vladimir Putin. After the West slapped sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea and stoking a war in Ukraine’s east in 2014, Putin responded by banning agricultural imports from the European Union, the U.S., and several other countries. Customs inspectors made a show of destroying banned products at the border, resulting in surreal scenes of cheese thrown into incinerators and geese flattened by bulldozers.

Although the embargo sent food prices soaring, Russians largely supported it: According to the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, most say it has made Russia more respected. “Russia can provide for itself,” crowed the pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets. And indeed, the ban has been a boon for Russian agriculture. With many ingredients unavailable (and others rendered prohibitively expensive after the ruble went belly-up in 2014), chefs are seeking producers closer to home. “After the sanctions, everyone understood that there’s no other way out,” Uilliam Lamberti, an Italian chef behind several Moscow establishments, told the culinary magazine Afisha Eda.

{module [280]}In a sign of the times, Arkady Novikov, a restaurateur whose swanky, import-heavy establishments set the tone for the post-Soviet Moscow food scene, has opened a string of more locally focused projects: Valenok, which serves upmarket versions of Soviet classics; Farsh, a burger chain that uses only Russian meat; and Syrovarnya, which produces its cheeses on-site. Meanwhile, White Rabbit, where executive chef Vladimir Mukhin creates modern spins on prerevolutionary Russian recipes—moose-lip dumplings, the cabbage soup shchi, a yogurt drink that Mukhin serves with goose liver—is now No. 23 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

Akimov cautions that the movement is just beginning. Challenges abound, including Russia’s shoddy infrastructure, which can make getting food from farms to tables a nightmare (local is a relative term in a country with 11 time zones). Nonetheless, he says, “people are thinking more about what they eat, about responsible consumption, about supporting local farmers.” LavkaLavka now has an expansive suburban market and five smaller shops, along with the restaurant, whose ingredients are all sourced from Russian producers.

After the deer heart comes a salad of crab from Kamchatka and a delicate river pike perch. We chase it down with infused polugar, an ancient Russian bread wine (a forefather to vodka) that’s enjoying a comeback.

Some days, you treat yourself to organic raspberries and mangoes. Other days, when it’s been a while since payday, perhaps you stick to apples and bananas.

Prepare for your mind to boggle then, at the news that people in Japan are buying melons that cost as much as a new car.

This specific variety of melon is called the Yubari King and is actually a cross between two types of cantaloupe.

Just like Kobe beef or champagne, the fruit can only be produced in a certain region in order to be named thus - Yubari.

A pair of the premium cantaloupes has recently sold at auction for an astounding ¥3 million (£21,500).

That’s over £10,000 for one melon. Just let that sink in.

The reason Yubari King melons are so expensive is reportedly their sweetness.

However this latest sale is record-breaking. Previously, Yubari melons have been bought for no more than £19,000.

Normally they cost between £40 and £80, which - although significantly less - is still an extraordinary amount to pay for one fruit.

The successful bidder who claimed the melons is a supermarket buyer in Hyogo Prefecture. “I wanted to return a favour to the farmers of Yubari, who help us every year,” he said.

This is not the first example of the Japanese spending vast amounts of money on fruit though.

There was the case of individual strawberries being sold for £17 (each one packaged in its own box, where the strawberry lay on a bed of hay) not to mention the bunch of grapes that sold for nearly £8,000 - it’s probably best not to think about how much that costs per grape.

A pair of melons for £21,500 - truly for the person who has everything (except maybe sense).

A self-confessed nation of gastronomes, France on Tuesday showcased its famous cuisine by hosting "Good France", a global promotion of its mouthwatering morsels.

Some 2,000 restaurants from Bogota to Wuhan, via Moscow and Kolkata, 71 culinary schools and 150 French embassies are hosting the promotion, a joint initiative by top chef Alain Ducasse and the foreign ministry.

The event, which was first held in 2015 to "pay homage to the excellence of French cuisine," is focusing on training for catering-related industries to promote the French art of eating.

The event gathered international students of the arts of culinary preparation and presentation as the selected restaurants and embassies concocted 1500 innovative "French dinners", for all budgets.

"To speak of French cuisine is to speak of joie de vivre, levity, optimism and pleasure," Ducasse said ahead of the offering, adding such concepts were "central ideas" going to the heart of the French soul.

Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Tuesday that this year's edition of the event prioritised "training in careers related to catering, hotels and tourism," in order to spread the word on the importance of good eating.

Ayrault added that the promotion, inspired by Auguste Escoffier's 1912 Dinners of Epicure project to offer the same menu on the same days in cities across the globe, would "promote gastronomy and thereby France's image as a tourist destination."

Escoffier was a famed chef, restaurateur and writer on all matters relating to haute cuisine who was dubbed the "king of chefs and chef of kings".

Ayrault expressed the hope the promotion would encourage young people "to perpetuate the art of cooking."

Catering students attending the global promotion will be offered internships at French embassies, while in Britain, both French and non-French chefs offered "taste education" sessions at a handful of schools.

In Paris, six of the capital's most renowned catering schools offered some 6,000 nibbles to tourists visiting the Arc de Triomphe.

Last year's edition in France saw more than 200,000 guests regaled with the finest cuisine in 1,700 restaurants and 150 embassies.

While the dishes served up with be French or French-inspired, the vast majority of the chefs were not.

Organisers said they wanted to send out a message of modernity and excellence, while indicating that the non-French chefs were not required in any sense to "renounce their own culinary tradition" but rather "we propose they marry it with French cuisine."

When Pichet Ong left the frenetic life of New York restaurants in 2009, he never imagined a career spent making dessert could take shape on the road.

Today, the A-list pastry chef, who has worked with world-famous chefs including Jean-Georges Vongrichten, published cookbooks, appeared on Top Chef and was named one of the Top 10 pastry chefs in America, travels with his own vanilla beans so he’s always prepared to whip up some last-minute cake batter for clients in need of a tasting.

Ong, a 48-year-old Singapore native who has lived in New York for more than 20 years, now spends his time on a whirlwind of consulting gigs for the crème-de-la-crème — from cruise lines and hotels to global restaurant chains and patisseries.

The job comes with intense back-to-back travel, building intricate spreadsheets to keep pace and last-minute prep for restaurant launches that goes way beyond dessert. In the last year alone, he’s spent time in Dubai, Thailand, Singapore, and Houston in Texas, just to name a few.

As a consultant, Ong often swoops in to help with one very specific part of the puzzle. “You have to be really obsessed with small details because you don’t always know what the result is,” he says.

At times, he can spend as little as a few days on a project, which requires him to prepare ahead of time to understand one specific part of the company’s business and the local cultural context—but he might never see the end result.

A typical day?

Luckily, the job includes delicious perks. In the past 12 months, for instance, Ong has brand systemised recipes for Rhong Tiam, a chain of affordable Thai restaurants, to be used in its new locations in Dubai and Toronto; and worked on growth strategies with the Nestle-owned KitKat brand in Japan. He also helped create limited-edition flavours of ice cream (including chocolate mousse, black forest and green tea) for Häagen-Dazs’s Asia-based shops.

“There were 17 kinds of vanilla beans you had to taste through and in different combinations — it’s actually a lot of work,” he says.

While New York is Ong’s home base, he typically travels every few weeks, as close as a three-hour flight to Texas in the US or as far as a 21-hour flight to Singapore.. Between consulting projects, he fills gaps while home in New York by styling food for magazines or cookbooks and catching up with friends, some of whom still work in the city’s kitchens.

He tacks on extra days before and after projects to browse local markets, see the sites and taste popular dishes. The extra time spent in each place helps him figure out how global food trends are adapted in a particular area and what ingredients help to define a specific place. Clients across regions often have the same concerns, such as using alternative flours, healthy dessert options and how their flavors can translate to a global audience.

The myth of the sweet life

Life on the road isn’t all peaches and cream. The global life leaves Ong little time to tinker with his favourite chocolate-chip cookie recipe. And then there’s not being able to work in the same kitchen.

“I miss going to a place that’s consistent and familiar,” he admits.

To keep his work consistent no matter where he goes, Ong packs many ingredients that he has trouble finding in opposite corners of the globe. For instance, Ong brings along a food scale with metric measurements to avoid the kind of imprecise measuring that can derail a dough recipe. And he often packs his favourite rectangular cake forms, citrus zester and real vanilla bean pods — items that can take hours to find abroad.

“Vanilla is my secret weapon because [the beans] are expensive, it’s hard to find, and when clients taste it they go ‘wow it’s amazing’,” he says. “Most places still use [powdered vanilla] extract.”

A matter of taste

When he works abroad, Ong tries to infuse local flavours into his dessert menus and tweak slightly. In a way, he feels he has to understand the tastes and the culture to get it right. Early on he has to track the subtle cultural differences around key dishes and tap into ingredients that are prominent in a region to devise his own menu to fit their needs.

Often, he starts with one of his classic desserts and tweaks slightly. For instance, when working in Dubai,for instance, he sweetens his sticky toffee pudding with dates and brown sugar but omits alcohol. In Asia, he adds ginger to spice up the recipe without too much sugar.

“I’m always driven by ingreidents -- I use what’s local or what’s loved,” he says. “I’m not ashamed to put more of it on the menu.”

Even the customs around dessert can differ, he has found over time. In the Mideast, families tend to share dessert and order family style, while in Asia, guests nibble on a procession of smaller dishes.

The end goal comes down to appeasing cultural tastes, Ong says. “Every failure and every misstep is a learning process,” he says, “and it’s edible.”

It’s nearly impossible to visit Germany and not eat Currywurst or Bratwurst, two ubiquitous sausage dishes. But regardless of the sausage’s fame, it seems that Germans can’t get enough of the döner kebab.

The nation of 82 million people consumes two million kebabs a day, according to Gürsel Ülber, spokesman for the Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe (ATDiD). Safe to say, the thinly sliced meat – cooked on a vertical spit, wrapped in pita or flatbread and topped with salad – overrules the sausage-duo as a preferred fast-food option; a prominent symbol of the cultural and economic influence of Turkish immigration on German society.

Kadir Nurman and Mehmet Aygun are the two men credited for its invention in Berlin nearly 50 years ago. Both were part of the Gastarbeiter, a wave of guest workers brought in from Southern and Eastern Europe to boost West Germany’s post-war economy. And that they did, paving the way for a 200,000-strong workforce today.

Although there’s a lot of speculation as to the real story – with Aygun claiming he invented the snack a year before Nurman at his shop, Hasir, in 1971 – the ATDiD have formally given the honour to Nurman.

According to Ülber, Nurman sold Germany’s first döner kebab from his little stall across from Bahnhof Zoo in West Berlin back in 1972. What was traditionally grilled meat served with rice, salad and pita was transformed into a sandwich for hard-working and busy Germans to eat on the go, with both men claiming to have had the idea to put the meat inside the pita bread.

But irrespective of who first took the reins, both men set the foundation for what is today a €4bn trade in Germany, turning over a whopping 400 tonnes of meat a day and helping turn this much-loved street snack into a major staple of the German diet.

ATDiD reveals there are around 40,000 kebab shops across Germany, with Berlin leading the pack at 4,000, astonishingly more than Turkey’s most populous city, Istanbul, according to Visit Berlin. The German capital is closely followed by Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart.

The street-food snack so beloved that in 2011 a clever bunch of German university students even created a solution to “kebab breath”: is a drink made from ginger, parsley, mint and lemon that is claimed to neutralise the garlicky aftertaste.

But why is it so popular?

“Because it tastes so good,” as Ülber simply put it. “In your hand, you hold all the good ingredients. You have good protein and salads.”

But it’s not just the taste, large portions or affordability – costing anywhere between €4.50 to €14. What seems to have struck a chord is the ease with which it can be adapted.

Nurman’s creation involved only beef. But over time and due to the availability of different meats, the döner took a new turn to include chicken, lamb and turkey as well as different breads and extra toppings. Every eatery adds its own touch.

“Variations like iskender kebab (thinly cut grilled lamb, tomato sauce, pita bread, melted sheep butter and yogurt), adana kebab (hand-minced meat kebab mounted on a wide iron skewer) and koefte (a meatball including parsley and mint) have also become popular with customers,” said Evren Demircan, co-owner of World of Kebap in Stuttgart.

But it is the classic beef döner that has got Demircan’s customers hooked. He sells about 500 a week. On weekends that doubles.

To find out what all the fuss was about, I headed to Germany, where I quickly realized how wrong I was to consider it just a late-night snack for hungover party-goers.

As I walked through the Frankfurt’s thriving financial district, I was amazed to see just how many choices there were for eating it, from fancy restaurants to little cafes fitted with beautiful Turkish décor. As the lunch-time rush kicked in on a busy Friday afternoon, locals, business people and tourists alike flocked to their nearest kebab eatery, happily waiting in long lines for a satisfying feed.

While some opted for mixed grilled plates or koefte, I went straight for the serious stuff: a large beef döner at Nazar Kebap Haus (Schäfergasse 38). As I gripped the pita and took my first bite, the chilli sauce and yoghurt-garlic dressing oozed from the bottom. It was amazingly fresh and flavoursome, with the combination of juicy meat, sauces and crunchy salad definitely living up to the hype.

It seemed to me that the Turks have been hugely successful in managing to keep the dish’s legacy alive while also adapting it to the competitive and ever-evolving food world. And as the largest ethnic group of non-German origin in the country (Berlin boasts the largest Turkish community outside Turkey) their döner kebab has served as an important vehicle in not only servicing the economy and satisfying locals, but has helped forge a bond between the two cultures.

For many Turkish immigrants, the döner has come to represent opportunity. And even after nearly five decades, with different generations keeping the döner legacy alive, the pioneers are never forgotten.

“Of course, we thank Kadir and Mehmet. Not only did they invent the kebab but they laid the groundwork for the whole industry and in turn many people’s livelihood,” Demircan said. “Many industries have profited from the döner trade.”

Dry January is almost over, and temporary teetotallers everywhere will soon be back on the booze. That word ‘booze’ tends to conjure up a certain amount of slurring, with perhaps a swig of decadence thrown in. It also sounds distinctly modern. It is, in fact, over five centuries old, having slipped into English from the Dutch word buizen, to drink to excess. It gets an early mention in the Elizabethan play Jack Drum’s Entertainmentand the pithy statement ‘You must needs bouze’ - a sentiment with which few of January’s hydropots (one term for water-drinkers) would disagree.

‘Booze’ was once a popular term in the slang or ‘cant’ of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today. But whether formally or informally, when it comes to alcohol, English has been hard at work for centuries. ‘Alcohol’ itself is 800 years old, taken from the Spanish Arabic al-kuḥul which meant ‘the kohl’, linking it with the same black eye cosmetic you’ll find on any modern make-up counter. The term was originally applied to powders or essences obtained by alchemists through the process of distillation. This included both unguents for the face as well as liquid spirits of the intoxicating kind.

The heady result has been with us ever since. Purveyors of the strong stuff have invited hundreds of epithets over a millennium or more. Drinkers of the past would happily visit ‘the Lushington crib’, ‘shicker shop’, or ‘fuddle-caps hall’ (ie the local pub) to sample the offerings of the landlord - aka the jolly ‘knight of the spigot’.

The concoctions those knights dispensed fill an even richer lexicon, veering from the euphemistic ‘tiger’s milk’ to the blatant invitation of ‘strip-me-naked’. Add those to the 3,000 words English currently holds for the state of being drunk (including ‘ramsquaddled’, ‘obfusticated’, ‘tight as a tick’, and the curious ‘been too free with Sir Richard’) and you’ll find that the only subjects that fill the pages of English slang more are money and sex.

Such a lush lexicon makes it all the harder to forsake alcohol for a whole month. Those who’ve made it, however, can console themselves with the fact that they have enjoyed weeks without the unpleasantness of feeling ‘crapulent’, ‘cropsick’, or ‘wamble-cropped’: three beautifully expressive words for the dreaded hangover.

In days gone by, drinkers opted for extreme cure-alls for the morning after the night before, from the ashes of a crab to the drinking of vinegar, although the wealthier might have preferred dropping an amethyst into their glass before imbibing. ‘Amethyst’ itself came to the language from the Ancient Greek amethustos, which means ‘not drunken’, because the stone was once believed to hold magical properties that prevented intoxication.

Meanwhile, the idea of having a ‘hair of the dog (that bit you)’ was once entirely literal. In the Middle Ages, anyone bitten by a stray dog would run after the offending animal in an attempt to pluck out one of its hairs: a poultice with that hair was believed to greatly ease the post-drinking blues (what in German they call a Katzenjammer, in which the drinker’s moans are compared to the wailing of a very miserable cat). It is probably entirely appropriate that the word ‘poison’ is rooted in the Latin potare, to drink.

‘Drunk as a thrush’

Those on the wagon can afford a smug smile over shenanigans like these. The wagon in question originally carried water around small town America during the temperance movement, when citizens were urged to embrace ‘tee-totallism’, in which the ‘tee’ was there simply to give emphasis to the first letter of Total.

The idea soon crossed to Britain, where abstinence battled with the thrill of being ‘drunk as a lord’, an expression from the 17th Century that’s curiously linked to the swear-word ‘bloody’. The expletive is thought to have begun with the ‘bloods’ or aristocratic rowdies of the same period, when to be ‘bloody drunk’ was to be as ‘drunk as a blood’ – in other words, as sloshed as a posh hooligan. There was, it seems, nothing these bloods liked more than painting the town red, another phrase in the drinking arsenal that the town of Melton Mowbray near Leicester in the East Midlands of England has claimed for its own, thanks to a night when the Marquis of Waterford and a group of friends ran riot with pots of scarlet paint.

For all that partakers in dry January have avoided such results of befuddlement directly, it would be hard to do so with their more metaphorical tongues, for drinking is behind a surprising number of words that have since hidden their tipsy history. The adjective ‘bridal’ began as ‘bride-ale’, and was used of a wedding feast that featured plenty of the strong stuff. ‘Small beer’, on the other hand, was a heavily watered-down version of the original, enjoyed by both children and adults when drinking water could prove a lot more perilous than ale.

While we like nothing better than lampooning politicians on social media these days, that word too has its roots in guzzling. ‘Lampons!’, for the French, meant ‘let us drink!’, and was an exhortation to merry revellers to pick up their glasses and sing a song or two. As those songs tended to be mocking and satirical, so our modern sense of ridicule crept in. Lampooning and carousing went together – appropriately enough given that ‘carouse’ is from the German gar aus trinken, meaning ‘drink to the bottom of the glass’.

There’s an even more surprising word to add to this list. We may be ‘pissed as a newt’ these days, but for the Romans the image of choice would be ‘drunk as a thrush’, an allusion it seems to the bird’s merry tottering around vineyards after feasting on fermented grapes. Bizarrely, our English word ‘sturdy’ may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as ‘sturdy’ in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

Birds do it, newts do it, even educated lords do it: the pull of getting groggy seems hard to resist. Especially if you’re a sailor, whose associations with rum are legendary. Fittingly, ‘groggy’ itself was born on the high seas thanks to the English naval officer Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed Old Grog on account of his thick coat made of coarse grogram cloth. It was Vernon who gave the unhappy order that his sailors’ rations of rum should be diluted with water. He surely would not, then, have approved of two expressions that emerged in the sailors’ slang of his day.

An Admiral of the Narrow Seas is defined in Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongueas “one who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him”. (Worse still, a Vice-Admiral of those same seas is ‘a drunken man that pisses under the table into his companion’s shoes’.) Not for nothing, perhaps, were those who liked to throw back their mug of beer and drink its contents with relish known as ‘tosspots’ from the start.

Tosspot or hydropot, English has lessons for us all. And if a pint of foaming ale or glass of tantalizing red is beckoning from the hands of February, cheers. And don’t forget your amethyst.